Gone to Earth
Description
GONE TO EARTH brings to light, late in the long, distinguished career of poet Eleanor Wilner, her early uncollected poems-an unveiling of the first stages of a vital, imaginative process, in whose evocative, imagistic landscapes is enacted a drama of emergence from entrapment. In the often-painful drama of new birth, from the deadly strictures and oppressions of the older social forms, come the living forces undermining them-new life seeded out of a decaying order: "a wet nose / breaks the earth, and sniffs the river air." Written during the poet's immersion in the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, an inner liberating struggle is tuned to a collective channel where communal memory and vision are undergoing transformation.
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Person
Eleanor Wilner has published eight books of poetry, most recently Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Tourist in Hell (University of Chicago Press, 2010). Her awards include the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America; fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the NEA; the Juniper Prize, and three Pushcart prizes. Her poems have appeared in more than fifty anthologies, including the 2014 and 2016 editions of Best American Poetry. She has taught for many years for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Content
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- To the Reader
- I. EARLY POEMS 1963-1973
- Prelude
- Ritual
- i. in for it now
- Mother of Pearl
- Ripeness
- Reveries in an Old Dawn
- Tracks, at a Remove
- Pastoral
- Country Cousin
- Undoing
- ii. locked in
- March Return
- Even the Hands Ache
- Resistance
- Stasis
- Daphne
- No Trespassing
- Brochure on the Humanities
- iii. looking back
- Admission Paid: Fort McHenry and Other Shrines
- Fever
- The Last Tapestry
- The Invention of Writing
- For a Russian Writer in Exile
- MONT ST. MICHEL
- Eastern Front, Western Range
- Solstice Song
- iv. bringing it down
- Alarms
- Lynda Bird's Lullaby
- Lingua Franca
- Scale Shift
- Notations for a Song
- Creation Story
- Almost There
- v. crossing
- Crossing the Equator
- Escape
- Repair
- Defection
- On the Beach
- Ariadne's Prayer
- The Expedience of Emblems
- II. AFTER THAT: Uncollected Poems
- Out of the Unlikely, We Come to Dance
- The Poets' Competition at Barcelona
- A Green Blues for Etheridge
- Recycled Song
- That Story
- Reading the News
- Brother Cloud
- What do myths have to do with the price of fish?
- Olympus and the End of Winter
- Notes
- Biographical Note
